One more time — People remember 10%, 20%…

Okay, here’s another example of the same incorrect information that plagues our field. This is from a company named Percepsys:

 

Hopefully, sometime soon, the webpage on their site won’t work because the vendor will smarten up and remove this misinformation. NOTE from 2017: The company appears to be no longer in business.

It’s NOT TRUE that people remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, etc. Moreover, if you know anything about learning, you’d know it would be impossible to pin down the amount of remembering. It depends on the materials, the learners, the duration of learning, the type of learning activities, the consistency between the learning situation and the retrieval situation, and the length of retention among other things. Finally, while this information (the 10%, 20%, 30% information) is often attached to Dale’s Cone, Dale never actually had any numbers on his cone.

For the best review of the history of this misdirection, if I must say so myself, is here.